Mexicans, who either broke into the country or were voluntarily imported by the government, number 12.1 million, the highest ever. They accounted for 44 percent of the total foreign-born population last year, with 740,000 coming to the U.S.

Illegal immigration is growing once again — CIS estimates eight in 10 illegals are from Mexico and Latin America. Currently, the 12.1 million Mexicans living in the U.S. send remittances totaling over $20 billion, annually, out of the American economy back to their home country. The U.S. ballooned its population with unnatural levels of immigration from 30.2 million to 42.1 million in only 14 and a half years — against nearly all Americans’ fervent wishes.

Most importantly, these massive waves of immigration are the result of current immigration policy. Like tax codes, setting immigration levels is a basic function of government. Americans have an unusual speech tic in which they use the words “legal” or “illegal” to soften rhetoric about immigration as an instinctive cringe. The truth is, as CIS notes, unless laws are passed to change current immigration policy, the U.S. will issue more green cards in the next ten years than the populations of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina combined. That’s ten million foreigners from countries with autocratic governments and socialist economies to compete with Americans for jobs in a struggling economy.

As Democratic Rep. Kurt Schrader put it: “Immigration reform is probably the biggest issue of the 21st century. It will decide who is in charge of this country for the next 20 or 30 years.”

Current immigration policies also prop up the backward, impoverished, violent countries from which we import most of our foreigners. One-fifth of El Salvador currently lives in the U.S. and sends back remittances that contribute 16 percent of that country’s GDP as of 2013, for example. It also strangles economic growth, as Breitbart News previously reported: A record 93,626,000 Americans have stopped looking for work in an economy that created only one job for every two immigrants the Bush and Obama administrations let in from 2000 to 2014, and 36 percent of young workers under age 24 are never hired by employers, pushed out of the job market by older workers and H-1B visa holders.

CIS notes that while the national conservation on immigration centers on illegals, the much larger waves of foreigners imported as a matter of government policy is almost never discussed, even though it’s fundamentally transformed the country. As political elites of both parties and Big Business wanted.